Prodigal
by Fellowshipper
Summary: Before showing up in the attic during the Titans attack, Chris visits the Manor and reflects on where it all went wrong, and how he can make it right again. Set just prior to 5x21, "Oh My Goddess."


It wasn't the same. It was, but it _wasn't_, and those differences were what unsettled him most.

Chris Halliwell stood on the sidewalk, hands shoved in his pockets, squinting against the bright sunlight as he looked up at the imposing house. It looked a lot different in natural light, with the neighbors' houses still standing, without looking like a curiously preserved relic in the middle of a deserted wasteland. The paint seemed a little fresher, the windows a little cleaner, flowers carefully tended in a yard that hadn't yet been overgrown with weeds.

It was just a house. A beautiful house, a stunning example of the area's exquisite Victorian constructions, but still just a house. He supposed that he should be overcome with conflicting emotions upon arriving at his childhood home, but it hadn't been his home for quite some time. In fact, it hadn't been that great even when he was there before – in the future, in his own time. The people who lived and visited there had made it as warm and inviting as it was, but they were all gone now, every last one of them, and this house, this beautiful old house, _his _house, was little more to him than a memorial. It was a testament to how very quickly life could be turned upside down. It was a symbol of everything he had lost and everything he hoped to reclaim, no matter what the cost. But it was not his home.

That was what he'd tried to convince himself, at least, when he was pacing through Golden Gate Park earlier and naively wondering if he could slip into the house sooner than he'd anticipated. The plan upon leaving his time was to intervene only at the precise moment when the Charmed Ones would be weakened and vulnerable, but not late enough to cause any permanent damage. He'd promised his cousin Henry that he wouldn't put his mother Paige in any unnecessary danger. After poring over stacks of history books, the two of them and Bianca finally decided that he would make his presence known to the sisters during their first encounter with the Titans. Chris vaguely recalled stories about the magical community working out on their own that they could free Paige from her stone prison; the Charmed Ones, not having the benefit of hindsight, didn't need to know that Chris knew that, or that Paige hadn't really died during that first attack.

That was the easy part. Chris had always thrived under pressure, working better and faster while under stress than he did when he had time to overanalyze everything. It was the time between those stressful moments that worried him. How was he supposed to keep a suitable distance from the sisters, his _family, _and yet protect them at the same time? If the Valkyries kept up their end of the bargain as promised, Leo would be out of the picture long enough that the sisters would actually need their new Whitelighter. How could he keep up pretenses as a regular Whitelighter when he couldn't heal? What if Piper flew into a rage and blew him up, as she had with Leo, and he didn't reform immediately? He _could _reform from such a blast; he knew that from one especially painful lesson with Wyatt after his most recent capture. But where Leo and any other full Whitelighter could reform painlessly, it was a slow, excruciating process for Chris. Or what if Piper tried to freeze him instead and found that it didn't work on him? Phoebe would come into her empathic powers very soon as well; she could sniff him out and ruin his plans before he even really got started. And Paige . . . She had a way of finding out the truth about those who earned her suspicion. There was a reason Cole Turner hadn't ended up being Chris's uncle after all.

There were so many ways this could all go terribly wrong, so much he didn't know, so many variables he couldn't have known about and hadn't taken into account. He knew he should have been back at his commandeered apartment, rehearsing exactly what he was going to do and say the first time he saw his long-dead family in the flesh, but for once, for just this once and likely at the worst possible time, his all-business work ethic failed him. The day before the Titan would arrive in the attic and turn Paige to stone, the day before he would put this elaborate scheme into motion, he found himself roaming aimlessly through San Francisco, a city he had loved his entire life even without ever seeing it quite like this.

The cars were a bit old-fashioned, along with most of the clothes, but what surprised him most was just how very _bright _everything was. The world – his world – hadn't always been a miserable hellhole, of course. But when the Charmed Ones were killed, when Wyatt let his grief and anger consume him until he became even worse than the Source he vanquished, the world fell into darkness. San Francisco had been taken first, naturally, and once Evil gained control of such a magical stronghold, the rest of the world quickly followed. Demons spread rapidly and uncontrollably throughout the world, and though it wasn't exactly a plague of locusts, the street corner prophets weren't wrong to shriek about the end of the world. Entire armies were no match for the new Source and his legions of demonic soldiers, for though they had strength in numbers, they were still human. They still bled. They died. By the hundreds, thousands, millions, before finally brokering a "peace." As Chris saw it, peace was just another word for retreat.

The demons recreated hell on earth, destroying everything good around them, and the world Chris had lived in for the past several years still bore the scars of those first tumultuous battles before Wyatt finally reined in his underlings. The demons found beauty only in death and decay, and their world reflected that.

This world, though. This eerily familiar and yet completely alien world, the one everyone seemed to think was so horrible they could hardly stand it, was nothing short of paradise to Chris. There were no demon hordes roaming the streets, taking or killing anything they wanted. Even after all this time, Chris still had nightmares about the chaos of the early takeover, when he couldn't sleep for the constant screams around him, when blood clogged the city drains and corpses littered the streets, their faces frozen in eternal terror. Eventually people learned it was safer to just stay inside, if they couldn't get out of the city entirely.

The city was surprisingly noisy now, filled with car horns blaring, music drifting out of open apartment windows and shop doors, laughter, arguments, friendly chatter. People moved about freely without looking at everyone else like potential enemies; Chris had to stop himself at the last second the first time he saw a child at an outdoor café. In another life, that would have indicated desperation and fear, and Chris would have pulled the child and his parents aside to offer them an orb to a safer location, or a place with the Resistance if they had nowhere else to go. It seemed odd, then, when he realized they were just an ordinary family out enjoying an ordinary lunch.

He justified to himself that he was only going to visit the Manor to reacquaint himself with the layout of the house. It was business related that way. Never mind the fact that he knew that house like the back of his hand and could navigate it blindfolded even though so much time had passed since he'd last set foot in it. He reasoned that the girls would all be at work, Wyatt at daycare, and if any of them came home early he would sense them and just orb out before they caught him.

He walked slowly up the front steps, breath catching in his throat when he instinctively reached out to touch the stained glass windows in the front door. How many times had that glass been broken and rebuilt, magically or otherwise? He and Wyatt had been roughhousing with their cousins one day when one of them – Chris had always believed it was Henry, though he had no proof – accidentally broke one of the glass panes after the basketball they'd been tossing around sailed over Chris's head and through the window. No problem, they thought. They'd just cast a quick spell and make everything good as new. That might have worked, too, if Wyatt hadn't tweaked the spell so that the original stained glass designs were replaced with brightly colored comic book characters. He'd made a pretty good case for the "upgrade" when Piper inevitably called the boys out on it, though, Chris had to admit that much, and the memory drew the first real smile from him that he'd felt in a long time.

Glancing over his shoulder to make sure no one saw him, Chris stepped into the shaded corner of the porch and disappeared in a blue orb cloud, reforming in the foyer just on the other side of the door. It took him another few seconds of mental preparation for him to force his eyes open and take his first look around the house that would eventually, hopefully, be his home.

It was different.

He'd expected that, obviously, but he hadn't really considered just _how _different things would be. He remembered toys everywhere and lots of photos of the Charmed Ones' own children on the walls, not portraits and even paintings of ancestors Chris had never met. There was supposed to be childish artwork proudly on display everywhere because Piper could never tell her boys no when they brought home another new art class project; flower arrangements and tasteful art prints, on the other hand, made Chris feel a bit uneasy.

The natural light streaming through the windows, the lack of gawking tourists and demonic guards, the gaudy artifact displays replaced by practical furniture, all combined to make Chris's head swim as his eyes darted everywhere in a futile attempt to take in his surroundings. It even smelled the same. Before Wyatt's "restoration," before everything took on the unmistakable stench of decay and sulfur, the Manor had smelled like . . . like home. It had been a very long time, but Chris vividly remembered the constant smell of food, whether Piper was cooking in the kitchen or one of the aunts was using the house to host a party of some sort or, on rare occasions, Piper took the night off and allowed herself a movie night at home with her boys and delivery pizza. It still smelled like food. Something Italian and spicy, Chris thought, letting his memories pull him toward the kitchen.

Piper had been making lasagna when she was killed.

Chris stood frozen in the doorway, ghostly images playing out before his eyes. He'd stayed late after school for soccer practice; he didn't particularly _like _playing, but he'd eventually grown weary of Leo's constant fussing at him about doing something physical to go along with his studies. Wyatt was the more physical one between them, the one who would play any sport or go on any adventure. Chris was much more likely to be found reading or working out new potion recipes with his Aunt Paige. But maybe, he reasoned, maybe if he acted more like Wyatt, Leo would stop looking at him like he was a mild disappointment, never enough to make Chris feel that Leo didn't like him, but more than enough to make him feel like the second choice in any contest for their father's affections.

In the present, Chris blinked as split-second flashes of memories assaulted him, refusing to leave him in peace. He heard his backpack and his gym bag hit the ground as the front door closed behind him. He smelled lasagna, and his stomach growled, hopeful that dinner would be sooner than later.

"Mom, I'm home." It was his voice, almost, but still a bit pitchy as his fourteen-year-old body continued to adjust to adolescence. He turned, startled, but found that the phantom noises were just that; there were no bags by the door, no younger version of himself flipping through the mail on the foyer table, checking for any bad news from school that he needed to prepare himself to face – or, more likely, that he needed to warn Wyatt about before he walked into a lecture of his own.

"Wyatt?" the voice called again, and after another impossibly fast flash, Chris found himself back in the doorway of the kitchen, watching, horrified, as his younger self came rushing into the room, slipped on the blood-soaked floor, and stared in shock at his mother's prone form. He tried to stop the bleeding by taking off his jacket and pressing it firmly against the broad hole in Piper's stomach, but the wound bled through, staining his hands red and spilling out onto his jeans. Desperate, he screamed up at the ceiling, first for Wyatt, then Dad, then Paige, and finally to God, whoever might be listening and willing to help. When no answer came, when Piper's eyes began to glaze over and she began making odd gurgling noises in the back of her throat, he panicked, calling on his powers in ways he'd never dreamed of using them. He wasn't nearly as strong as Wyatt or his parents or, really, anyone in his family; even several of his cousins had more raw power than he did. What he did have, though, was the resourcefulness to use his abilities in creative ways. And besides that, he'd long been summoning his Aunt Prue's spirit to help him hone his telekinesis; between her and Grams, what better teachers could he possibly have asked for?

"Phone!"

The handset orbed from its cradle into his hand, and though it slipped through his slick fingers, he finally grasped it well enough to dial 911. In the meantime, cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder, he held his hands over his mother's stomach and concentrated. He couldn't heal. It had taken Paige forever to tap into that part of her Whitelighter heritage, and Wyatt had always been an exception to every rule. He wasn't going to waste time with that. Rather, he focused on the wound itself, brow furrowing as he telekinetically held it closed, forcing the blood back into Piper's body and, he hoped, directing it back toward vital organs, at least long enough to keep her alive until help got there.

It wasn't enough. Story of Chris's life, it simply wasn't enough. Despite his best efforts, despite the emergency operator's reassurances that a squad was en route and very close, Chris watched the life drain from Piper's eyes, felt her body go slack under his hands, heard her take one last, agonizingly jagged breath. The last thing she ever said was that she loved him.

Dumbstruck, Chris lost his focus, failed to notice the pressure building up under his hands until the blood he'd been forcing back surged out between his fingers and splattered on his face and dampened his t-shirt. He didn't notice until one of the paramedics gently walked him over to the sink a few minutes later.

That night, Wyatt had to heal his dehydration after spending hours throwing up what seemed to be everything he'd ever eaten.

Though he wasn't sure his legs could hold his weight, Chris edged out of the kitchen and turned his back against the adjacent wall, the beginnings of a panic attack chilling him to the bone as he tried to get his breathing back under control. Sweat beaded on his forehead and his pulse felt like he'd just run a sprint, and the living room tilted around him as his grip on reality seemed to weaken.

"Get a grip," he ordered himself sternly, squeezing his eyes shut to keep the dizziness at bay. When he opened them, everything was upright and stationary again, but the detached feeling of not really being awake remained. Maybe that had something to do with the time traveling. Or maybe, he thought darkly, this entire scheme had just been one huge stupid decision. How could he ever have thought that he could come here, stand in this house, _live _in it, even, and not be haunted by his memories? Just because those ghosts didn't technically exist in this time, didn't mean he'd suddenly forgotten them or that they'd stop bothering him.

When he felt strong enough to move again, Chris glanced back into the kitchen, somewhat surprised to see it look exactly the same as before the psychic backlash hit him. There were a couple dishes in the sink, no doubt Paige's doing, and there was a lone coffee cup on the kitchen table, no doubt _Phoebe's _doing, but otherwise the kitchen was clean and unassuming. Wyatt's highchair was folded and leaning against the wall next to the laundry room door. Family photos, scribbled notes, and Wyatt's crayon doodles were fixed to the refrigerator with mismatched magnets. The floor, once Chris found the nerve to look down, had recently been swept and mopped. That had to have been Piper's doing.

Reassured that he'd just had an especially vivid flashback and that he wasn't in fact losing his mind, Chris turned to head through the dining room and back toward the stairs, only to stop short as soon as he turned and felt another wave of memories crash over him. He remembered standing in that very same spot in the foyer, orbing in while yanking his suit jacket off and dropping it carelessly to the floor before reaching up and pulling insistently at his tie. As soon as Wyatt materialized beside him a moment later, he shot his older brother a _look _and, disgusted, stormed off into the living room.

"The _hell _was that, Wyatt?" he demanded, giving up on his tie and picking up his jacket, only to fling it angrily at his brother. "No, tell me, I'd really like to know what the hell is wrong with you and why you brought _demons _into a funeral."

"Chris, calm down."

"No! Don't – get off me!" he ordered, shrugging off Wyatt's hands on his arms and the accompanying soothing words. "Don't give me that crap. We just buried Phoebe. She was it, Wyatt, don't you get it? She was _it. _The last one. And you—you lead a pack of demons into the funeral, where there were mortals and everything? What the hell were you thinking, you idiot?"

"Chris—"

"You wanna keep going on this stupid vengeance quest or whatever it is that you're doing, fine. But for God's sake, put it aside long enough to let us put our last fucking relative in the ground, would you?"

Chris watched from the outside, biting his lip slightly as he followed his younger self's every move, even though he already knew exactly what was going to happen and what would be said. He was almost sixteen then, not even two years after Piper's death, but he already looked so much older. Those couple of years had aged him, ripped him from childhood straight into adulthood, and though he hadn't noticed it at the time, he could clearly see the strain now. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wondered if that's what Bianca had meant when she told him he seemed so much older than his actual age.

"Is that what you want? Huh?" Wyatt demanded, and Chris's attention was drawn back to a memory he didn't want to relive. "You want me to just cry about it and then move on? You want me to let them win? Forget that. They killed our family, Chris. They killed our _mother._"

"I know that!"

"I won't let them have you, too."

Chris had been too overcome with anger at his brother and disbelief at his recklessness then, but now, years later and forced to confront a scene he'd ignored all this time, Chris felt his chest constrict at the look of pure and utter heartbreak on Wyatt's face. Chris had always known that Wyatt took their family's rapid destruction much harder than anyone thought. He hid it well, seemed to have it all together, but no one else knew that Wyatt spent most of his time hunting in the Underworld. They didn't see the crazed, almost manic look in his eyes when he came back after a long hunt. They didn't see him come back covered in blood and carrying grotesque trophies that he said would serve as warnings to any future would-be attackers. He was the Twice Blessed. The strongest magical being ever to exist. And yet, for all that power, for all that concentration of complete _goodness _inside of him, he hadn't been able to save those closest to him. Chris knew that whatever had gotten to Wyatt as a baby had laid the groundwork, but his failure to live up to everyone's expectations had ultimately pushed him the rest of the way into madness.

"This is it, Chris," Wyatt continued, voice breaking slightly, and it was the closest Chris had ever seen him come to crying, at least since they were small children. He hadn't broken, even at their mother's funeral. Chris had thought him heartless at the time, but hindsight was apparently good for more than just emotional torture. "It's just us now. We're all we have. You're all I have. And I don't care what it takes, what I have to do, how many demons I have to go through, how many funerals I have to crash – I don't give a damn, Chris, I don't _care _what it takes, just as long as I keep you here with me. I need you."

Chris remembered finally, _finally _giving in to the overwhelming despair that had been threatening to crush him for the past two years, and he watched as his younger self at long last sank down to the floor and collapsed in a heap of shuddering sobs in Wyatt's arms. He was embarrassed about it then, but for the life of him, Chris couldn't remember why now. He'd just been a kid, a baby turned loose in the world that had slaughtered everything he loved.

"They left us," he mumbled against Wyatt's shoulder, barely getting the words out through a voice choked with tears. "Th-they all left us, Wy. Don't . . ."

"Shh. I won't," Wyatt promised, leaning his head atop Chris's. "I'm not going anywhere, Chris, I'm right here. I'll always be right here."

Within a year, Wyatt had vanquished the new Source and taken the mantle for himself, recruited most of the Underworld to his side, outed magic to the world, and started a global bid for power that left entire countries in ruins. Within two years, Chris struck the deepest blow to Wyatt's already fragile sanity by rejecting his position as second-in-command, betraying Wyatt in order to head up a small but surprisingly effective resistance movement. Within three years, any promise Wyatt had made to protect Chris was forgotten, replaced with new scars and a witch hunter's brand seared into his shoulder.

The vision faded, and though he could swear that he still felt Wyatt's arms wrapped tightly around him, Chris _knew _he'd feel raised skin through his shirt if he reached up to touch his shoulder. Reality, he reminded himself, was all that mattered now, not whatever memories he naively held onto – or, in this case, which refused to let him go, no matter how far in the past he ran in an attempt to escape them.

He slowly climbed the stairs, taking the time to record the similarities and differences that were no doubt going to throw him off-balance once he also had to worry about keeping up appearances around the Charmed Ones. There was Phoebe's room, which had become Wyatt's once Phoebe got married. Paige's room followed, and that had been Chris's once he was old enough to be moved from the nursery. The nursery itself still looked exactly as it did in pictures; a few less toys, perhaps, not quite as messy when it didn't have to accommodate two toddlers, but it was still remarkably unchanged.

Chris reached the end of the hall and took a quick peek into Piper and Leo's bedroom. That, too, looked the same, and as he closed the door again he felt a chill along his skin that he normally only got while casting a spell. He turned and only barely got a glimpse of himself and Wyatt chasing each other down the hallway. He was wearing the previous year's Halloween mask while Wyatt wore a towel tied around his shoulders and waved a fake wand at him as they went tearing down the stairs, shrieking and laughing the entire way. Some kids played cops and robbers. Some kids played army. But, as usual, Chris hadn't come from anything like a normal family, so he and Wyatt had always played "witches and demons." Somehow, he'd always been stuck playing the demon.

Wyatt had seemed so . . . they had never been normal, any of them, but he had seemed so _good _once, so sweet and eager to help anyone who needed it. Chris had a suspicion that if the family had ever had any doubts about one of the kids turning evil or even being anything less than perfect, he would have been the first suspect. He was always the withdrawn, quiet one, more likely to go off on his own and mouth off to those who bothered him because he just wanted to be left alone. Wyatt, on the other hand, was everyone's darling. Even when the darkness began creeping in and changing him, Chris was still the one others worried about. Wyatt was fine. He was strong. He was handling things. Chris, though, he was weak and fragile, ready to break at any moment. He needed extra attention. Wyatt continued to slip, but Chris was the only one who saw it. And he said nothing.

It wouldn't have made a difference anyway, he reasons now. By the time he realized it wasn't just a phase or Wyatt's peculiar way of working through his grief, he'd already amassed too much power. The Charmed Ones were dead. The balance of power had already been tipped far too much in evil's favor. Even if Chris had mustered the courage to tell anyone what he thought of Wyatt's increasingly shaky grasp on his humanity, even if anyone had actually believed these blasphemies against the Twice Blessed, none of it would have mattered. Chris had hesitated when he should have acted, waited too long, and in the process of trying to save his brother the embarrassment of a hasty accusation, he'd damned that same brother. Wyatt was already lost by the time Chris decided to stand up to him; Wyatt Halliwell officially became the Source before he was even legally an adult, all because Chris had failed to look out for him the way Wyatt had promised to guard him in return.

They both had a habit of breaking promises.

Chris continued up the stairs, pausing outside the attic door and taking a deep, calming breath before pushing it open and walking inside. It didn't smell musty and closed-off like his most recent memories told him it should have, but rather it smelled like herbs and spices, evidence of frequent potion-making. It smelled vaguely like incense and sage, luring him deeper into the attic. Even that same damned floorboard squeaked under his foot, just like always. Every time he'd played hide-and-seek with Wyatt and their cousins when they were children, that floorboard had given away anyone who tried to hide in the attic, which in turn always got the group of them in trouble when Piper reminded them that the attic was off-limits for play. Wyatt and Chris, of course, knew all about that floorboard and so they knew exactly how to avoid it, but their clumsy cousins managed to find it every single time. Chris didn't even try to miss it now.

And then, even though he wasn't looking for it, there it was. The Book of Shadows rested atop its podium, closed and half-hidden in darkness as clouds gathered outside and blocked out the sunlight. Chris didn't believe in omens. He walked toward the podium and reached out to touch the book, half-expecting it to jump out of his grasp at the last second. It wouldn't recognize him. It would see him as a threat. Wyatt had cursed it. Or maybe it was just a hologram, maybe he hadn't ever really left the attic in the first place. Yet there it was, real and solid under his hand, and it didn't move from its place. It trusted him. The first thing to recognize him in this time was an inanimate object, and, if he had his way about it, it would be the only one to know his true identity. There was something deeply saddening about that, but Chris couldn't be bothered to analyze that.

He opened the book and smiled softly to himself, slowly turning one page after another and just taking in the feel of the old, crisp paper under his fingers and the dust that always seemed to stir every time the book was moved. Curious, he flipped to the very back to check the last entry. Several that he remembered weren't yet added, including a couple that he'd made himself before everything went to hell.

He looked up and swore under his breath, his mind betraying him again by hurling him straight into another memory. The attic was dark, artificial lights glaring harshly overhead. The rage and disgust that settled like a cold lead ball in his stomach still felt exactly the same as it had that day when he orbed in, Wyatt's guards right behind him, and found his older brother sifting through a box of Paige's belongings, a bored expression on his face.

"Oh, good, you made it. I was afraid you'd miss the grand opening."

Chris, barely twenty-one and already showing signs of a hard-lived life, quickly dispatched one of the demons following him by telekinetically shoving him into the path of the energy ball his partner intended for the intruder. The second demon met a similar fate when Chris orbed him across the attic and impaled him on a coat hanger that collapsed under his weight. The splintered wood pierced the demon's chest, and within seconds the creature erupted into flames and then vanished.

"Shame. I rather liked those two."

"What are you doing, Wyatt?"

Wyatt shrugged and went back to looking through the box as though nothing had ever happened. "Looking for souvenirs for the gift shop. I'm sure Paige must have kept some of her paintings. Those could probably make a fair return."

"You son of a bitch," Chris seethed, rapidly crossing the distance between them and wrapping a hand in Wyatt's collar, pushing him away from the box and bringing their faces dangerously close. Wyatt had the size advantage both by weight and height, but Chris had intensity on his side; both of them knew Chris was exceedingly deadly when he was pushed past his breaking point. Wyatt, for all his recent antics, had thrown Chris far past that point.

"You do realize we share a mother, don't you?"

"Shut up," Chris forced out through clenched teeth, eyes narrowing to thin green slits. "I don't know what the hell you think you're doing, Wyatt, but it's gonna stop. Now. Do you hear me?"

"How could I not? You're screaming – and spitting – in my face."

"This is our _home_, Wyatt!" Chris hadn't meant to yell, just as he hadn't meant for his voice to waver a bit and give away just how much this really was bothering him. As if that wasn't already glaringly obvious. "This is – this is where we grew up! Where our _family _grew up! And now you wanna turn it into a museum?"

Wyatt rolled his eyes and pried Chris's hand off his shirt. "Already have, Chris. Come on, you're a smart kid. You know that. What, did you think I gave you that one-time-only amnesty deal so you could drop by for coffee?"

"You still sent your thugs after me. In case you didn't notice, they still tried to kill me."

"Oh, please. I did no such thing. Demons, you know, they aren't exactly the easiest beings to control." His lips twisted into a cruel smirk, making Chris shrink back despite himself. "Besides, not like you couldn't handle them. Clearly. Which reminds me, you'll need to clean up your mess before the doors open tonight."

"I don't believe you."

"Fine, then you can use a spell. Whatever. I don't care. Just make sure those ashes are gone."

"I don't _believe _you," Chris repeated, more vehemently this time. He pushed a frustrated hand through his hair. "Our family fought and _died _to protect this place, to protect _us_, and now you're turning it into a-a-a fucking tourist attraction? What the fuck? I mean, seriously, Wyatt, what the _fuck _is wrong with you?"

Before Chris could react to the way Wyatt's face darkened, he felt his throat constricting from the outside, cutting off his air supply as Wyatt slowly closed his hand into a fist. "First of all, little brother, watch your tongue. I let you get by with far more than I should, but just because I granted you amnesty to attend the opening of the museum doesn't mean you can speak to me however you wish. Second of all, it's not polite to curse." He gave one last squeeze before finally backing off just when Chris's eyes started to roll back in his head. Chris in turn dropped to his knees, gasping and choking for air and fighting the blackness that crept along the edges of his vision.

"Third," Wyatt continued, circling Chris's slumped form with the same bored detachment anyone else might reserve for an uninteresting science experiment, "you really should stop with this whole hero worship complex, you know. It's embarrassing. They weren't perfect, Chris. They weren't even that strong. They'd still be alive otherwise. No, they had the _potential _for greatness, but they squandered it. They listened to those fools in their silly robes, they let their humanity dictate to them what they should and shouldn't do, but they _weren't _human, Chris. Neither are we. Human rules, human morals, none of that applies to us. We're above that. They can't touch us because we're _better _than them."

"That's great, Adolf," Chris muttered, forcing himself onto his knees as he finally regained enough breath to speak. "Spare me the recruitment speech, okay?"

"Hitler references? Really, Chris, I thought you were better than that. Look." Wyatt knelt down next to Chris, resting an alarmingly gentle hand on his little brother's shoulder. The same one, Chris noted sourly, that he'd personally scarred with the witch hunter's brand not that long ago. "I realize that this is hard for you. You still want to believe that all Elders are good and all demons are bad and that life's so easily color coded into black and white to make everything easy for you. I get that. And I wish that was the way things really work, but it's not. Good, evil, right, wrong, it's all the same. It's all just bullshit human concepts that don't apply to us. They didn't apply to Mom or anyone else in our family, either. They tried to follow them, though, tried to pretend they were normal like everyone else, and where did it get them? It got them killed. It made them orphan their kids, just like it has to every other generation in our family. Are you really telling me that the Elders are doing anything good when they let so many of their so-called champions of good die young and tragic deaths?"

"The Elders didn't kill them," Chris pointed out, "demons did. Demons that you're working with, Wyatt, how _could _you?"

"You still don't get it, do you? They work for _me _now, Chris. They answer to _me. _I vanquished the Source, remember? I took out their entire hierarchy. If I wasn't in control, the entire Underworld would have come out by now. I keep them in line. You think the world's so bad now? If I didn't make them answer to me, there'd be nothing left."

"And killing innocents? Keeping the entire world terrified of you, that's all just, what, collateral damage?"

Wyatt smiled faintly. "Something like that. I thought you understood. You did once. We were happy together, just you and me, kicking ass and ruling side-by-side, just like we were always supposed to."

"Not like this, Wyatt. It was _never _supposed to be like this. You were supposed to be good."

The smile faded and Wyatt's face hardened, his voice slipping back into the cold indifference that had slowly warmed during his speech. "And our family should still be alive. A lot of things were supposed to be different, Christopher."

The air crackled with static electricity, making Chris tense in preparation for another fight. When the air pressure changed and settled, he looked up in time to see a young woman shimmer into the attic, long copper hair standing out against her black leather outfit and her olive skin. She glanced at Chris but barely acknowledged his presence, then looked up at Wyatt, shoulders squaring as though she expected a fight. Or, Chris realized when he saw her present a bloody athame for Wyatt's inspection, she'd just come from one.

"Target down, my lord."

"Please. It's just family, darling. You can call me Wyatt." He examined the athame, then nodded and handed it back, nodding toward Chris. "You remember my brother Chris, don't you?"

"I don't believe I've had the pleasure."

"Ah. Before your time. My mistake. Chris, I'd like you to meet Bianca. She's quite the assassin. Among her many other talents," Wyatt added, trailing his fingertips over her hip and earning a seductive grin for his troubles.

"Flattery will get you nowhere you haven't already been . . . my lord."

"Okay, great. So I've met Eva Braun now. That's awesome," Chris grumbled, getting to his feet and eying the pair warily. "Now if you'll excuse me . . ."

"Bianca, be a dear and take Chris home, won't you? I don't think he wants to stay for the opening ceremony, and I'd hate for him to ruin the evening by doing something stupid."

That was the last thing Chris remembered before waking up in a Resistance safe house, groggy, disoriented, and absolutely certain that Wyatt's pet assassin had let his comrades take him without much of a fight. He'd seen her fight since then and he knew without a doubt that she could have taken out the entire rescue team with barely any effort at all, yet none of them had anything besides superficial injuries. Chris still didn't know all the details, nor did he particularly care, so long as the end result was the same: his people were safe and Bianca eventually defected to their side. To _his _side.

He'd only been gone for a few days, but he already missed her. In her (their) time, thanks to the nature of time travel, he'd probably only been gone a few minutes. And it wasn't even that they'd never been separated before. Far from it. There were times, especially early on, when their paths wouldn't cross for weeks at a time. But at least then Chris had always been able to sense her, so long as they weren't in the Underworld. Here, he had no such connections. He'd felt an eerily familiar presence in the back of his mind upon first arriving through the portal, but he quickly realized, much to his discomfort, that that had to be Bianca's childhood self. If she'd been telling him the truth about her birthday, she would have been about four and a half then. The age difference didn't bother him, but being aware of her presence like this made him feel more than a little creepy, enough to completely block their connection. That, as it turned out, might have been a mistake, leaving him alone in the silent emptiness of his own mind. Without Bianca or his cousins' psychic presences flitting at the edges of his Whitelighter senses, he was finally left as thoroughly alone as he'd always feared he would be.

And now, to make matters worse, he was standing in the midst of a ticking time bomb just waiting to explode. Great.

"I hope you know what you're doing," he muttered to himself as he closed the Book of Shadows, allowing himself one last reverential stroke of the cover before stepping away. He turned and looked out the window just in time to see Paige's car pull up to the curb.

"Good luck, Aunt Paige. I'll see you tomorrow."

He orbed away as soon as the front door closed.


End file.
